Power BI is changing the way health services are provided

With healthcare representing one of the fastest growing business segments for Business Intelligence, Power BI is finding its way in to healthcare organizations worldwide where it’s being used to improve quality, performance and productivity.

Here are four examples from around the world:

United States: A provider/payor organization in the Midwest wanted to evaluate how to better serve populations of patients with chronic health conditions. Utilizing Power Query they combined internal data from their Electronic Medical Record system with external data from credible open data sources. Once completed they made use of Power Map to visualize the data and explore trends and patterns in their service area that might help them identify new ways of serving patients and consumers.

Anonymized view of the data used to explore population health patterns.

Norway: Helse Vest is a Norwegian health authority that operates 50 healthcare facilities. To meet requirements for a government patient safety program, the Authority needed to find a way to more quickly create analytical reports based on surgery trends and other medical data. Helse Vest implemented Power BI for Office 365, that employees now use to gather and visualized combined data from multiple hospitals. With Power BI the staff reduced the time to build reports from 14 days to less than 1 day, and Helse Vest can quickly comply with government requirements.

The Intervention Centre is the research and development unit at Oslo University Hospital charged with identifying clinical best practices and applying new technologies to healthcare management.

In one use case Radiology data was collected from department systems by Power Query and loaded into a cloud-based database hosted on a Power BI website which could be accessed and used as a collaboration site for sharing queries among researchers. Queries, in turn, could be made in the form of natural-language searches, eliminating the need for programming skills.

Hospital executives and researchers at the Intervention Centre say that they can use Power BI to speed analyses to deliver actionable information, collaborate better with researchers beyond the enterprise and avoid the capital and operating costs of a traditional BI solution.

The Foundation Trust initially made use of Power BI to evaluate the cost and efficacy of the use of drugs in the treatment process. One use case of Power BI was used to correlate weather data with the institution’s own data to identify the impact of inclement weather on the frequency of respiratory data to understand which drugs were being prescribed and how prescription patterns varied by locality. Use of this data is now being expended by collaborating with other hospitals to compare data through Power BI with a goal of identifying best practices in prescribing drugs.